


voyages

by tigrrmilk



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Life Keeps Going On, Misery, but it keeps on going and ends somewhere in summer/fall 2018, pre-canon mostly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 15:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: “The cops?” Lily says. Her voice is so soft. Sammy’s not used to hearing Lily sound like that. “Vanished? I don’t understand.”





	voyages

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for canon typical mental health stuff/references to suicidal feelings on sammy's part.

But now  
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.  
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;  
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:  
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

**Hart Crane, _from_ 'Voyages'**

He’s not surprised when he wakes up to find that Jack’s not in bed with him. Jack’s been erratic these past few months -- sleeping too much or way too little, asleep before Sammy gets to bed and up with the dawn, or only finally joining him in bed hours after Sammy’s drifted off.

Sammy’s slurping down a sad breakfast of black coffee when he really starts to wonder where Jack is. There’s no sign of him in the kitchen, or the living room, or the home study where Jack used to prepare for their show and where he now mostly just watches videos on youtube for hours at a time.

“Jack?” Sammy calls. He knocks on the bathroom door, but it swings open. Nothing in the spare bedroom, either -- and he tells himself not to panic. Maybe he ran out to the store. Maybe he left for work early. Maybe he’s gone out for an early morning walk. There are plenty of reasons why he might not be here.

There’s going to be something totally normal and rational behind whatever it is, and you’re just being crazy again, he tells himself. _This is why he stopped talking to you about the things he’s obsessed with, remember?_

Except. Sammy knows that nothing that’s going on with Jack right now is rational. It can’t be.

Sammy steps into the hallway at the front of the house when he realises two things. First: Jack’s bag is resting by the front door. It looks like it’s packed full. The front door is ajar.

Second, he can hear the low rumble of a car engine outside.

\---

Sammy, big shot radio host, is not a stranger to unexpected cabs turning up at the house to whisk him away to a meeting he’d either forgotten or not been told about beforehand.

Besides, what if Jack is just outside, waiting to drive them to work? Maybe he just forgot his bag, forgot to close the door. He’s not been the most organised recently.

Coffee still clutched in one hand, the first shoes he could find on his feet (a gross old pair of Jack’s flip flops, because that’s what California does to a person), Sammy cracks open the front door and steps outside.

Jack’s car is in the driveway. The front passenger-side door is open and the engine is clearly on, but as Sammy approaches he can’t see any sign of Jack. He looks under the seats, like Jack could have comfortably hidden from Sammy down there. He even pops open the trunk. _Nothing_ . A few books with walking routes for northern California. Some dust and grime. That’s _it_.

Sammy reaches out to pull Jack’s keys out of the ignition, then he takes a hard step back. Wait. He looks around him, wildly. It’s January, but it’s so sunny out here. He’ll never get used to it.

He pulls out his cellphone, and the first time it rings out, and then it just goes to voicemail.

_You’ve reached Jack Wright. If my mailbox is full, call back later -- I really want to hear from you._

Fuck.

He’s seeing dark spots dancing in front of his eyes. He turns around and calls out _Jack, Jack, Jack,_ until he’s hoarse. Until he’s sure the neighbours have probably called the cops on him for making a disturbance at -- he checks his watch -- 11am on a Saturday morning.

Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck_.

\---

In the end, it’s Sammy who has to call the cops.

\---

It’s a good thing the spare room is nominally Jack’s and has a handful of his things in it, and like... the wardrobe with his clothes in, Sammy thinks. Sammy doesn’t want to move stuff in case it’s evidence, but what if the cops see -- what if they see this small house, their _bedroom_ and just _know_.

It turns out it doesn’t really come up. The cops really don’t care that much. One of them pulls on his gloves and starts rifling through Jack’s packed bag while Sammy hovers nearby. He takes things out and throws them on the ground. Underwear. Socks. Three t-shirts. Jack’s phone, which has apparently turned itself off. A couple of pencils and a marker pen. Jack’s journal, wrapped up in a fourth t-shirt. Sammy’s heart jumps into his throat as he thinks of Jack, scribbling in it, curled protectively around it, saying, “You never listen to me about this, you never have, so I don’t know why I thought you might start now.” But Jack’s not here. _Jack’s not here_ . A pair of khakis. A pair of Sammy’s jeans that Jack stole at some point and always has to wear severely cuffed so he doesn’t trip over them. Jack’s wallet. A sweater; the burgundy one Sammy bought him three Christmases ago. Deodorant. Beta blockers. His water bottle. And folded right at the bottom of the bag, a hefty folder full of what looks like -- from the glimpses Sammy catches over the cop’s shoulder -- printouts of page upon page about that stupid town up in Oregon that he’s obsessed with. Not even useful-looking stuff. Yahoo Answers pages, emails, shitty badly-compressed photographs. Useless, stupid shit. What was any of it even _for_.

\---

“He ever done anything like this before, that you know of?” The cop asks him, later. “Can you think of any reason why he would take off?”

Sammy shakes his head to both. “I know he wanted to take a trip to Oregon, visit this town he was kinda obsessed with, but without his car, his phone, his wallet... it’s not exactly a short walk round the block.”

The cop is taking notes but Sammy can tell, he can tell with the long-honed instinct of a radio host desperate to keep listeners interested that he’s checked out, not really listening, that he doesn’t care about anything that Sammy’s telling him. He’d flip the channel if he could, and Sammy doesn’t blame him.

“Any trouble with drugs, gambling, anything like that? Anyone he might owe money to?”

Sammy says that he’s sure nothing like that was going on. And instinct, his instinct for Jack, tells him that he’s right. It wasn’t anything like that. But all of the erratic behaviour, the phonecalls and voicemails and strange obsessions...

“He was acting kind of strangely these past few months,” he says. He hesitates. “Talking a lot with strangers, um, _a_ stranger I think, on his cell, neglecting work, sleeping badly.” It feels like betrayal, saying it out loud. He’s giving up one of his biggest secrets and nobody even cares.

The cop looks over his shoulder at his colleague, who’s clearly ready to go. “Sounds like the last time you fell in love, Frankie.” The other cop flips him off.

“For real, though. Any girlfriend or anything?”

Sammy affects a cool shrug and tries not to let his voice shake. “He never brought anyone back that I saw.” It’s not a lie. “No clue who it was at the other end of the line. Never understood anything they were talking about.”

The cops take Jack’s phone and car keys for fingerprinting, they leave his notebook, and Sammy makes it to work that evening on time.

Which is better than he managed usually even when Jack was here. Even back when Jack used to care about this shit.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just coming,” Sammy always said, Jack desperate to leave. “It’s fine, I’m almost ready, I’m right behind you.”

\---

Before he gets to work that evening, though, Sammy makes the hardest phone call he’s ever had to make, maybe ever. Harder than calling the cops, because now it’s real, it’s real and he knows something is bad, that Jack has gone and it’s bad, it’s not just a little mistake he’s made.

The phone rings for long enough without cutting in with Lily’s asshole voicemail message that Sammy starts to wonder if maybe she changed her number. It’s been a few years, right?

But then. “Lily. You’d better have a fucking good reason for calling.”

“Hi Lily. Jack’s gone.”

“What do you mean, Jack’s gone? You mean he’s finally come to his senses and left your ass for a job with some integrity again? Or has he just found someo--”

Sammy can’t take this. “No, he’s fucking vanished into thin air, and the cops just left, and I swear to god if you crack one more _joke--_ ”

“The cops?” Lily says. Her voice is so soft. Sammy’s not used to hearing Lily sound like that. “ _Vanished_? I don’t understand.”

\---

But then Lily and her parents -- Jack’s parents -- arrive in town and it all goes to hell. Because it doesn’t fix anything. Lily still hates him, Jack’s parents still think he’s just the annoying college roommate who dragged their son to LA for a job on an offensive radio show, and nobody will talk to him, and all he has left is his stupid job which was only ever bearable because of Jack anyway.

\---

“Lily, you don’t understand,” Sammy says. He feels like he’s just talking in endless fucking circles, like he’s stuck in place, and Jack has travelled so far, drifted, waltzed so far away by now that he’s never going to catch him. It’s been a week, and nothing. “You didn’t hear these phone calls. They were crazy. And some of the things he’d try and get me to care about... I’ve never. I’d never. I’d never seen him like that. It was like this town had made him _lose his mind_.”

“Jack was always into spooky shit,” Lily says, impatiently. “People don’t vanish into thin air because they watched a few old episodes of _Mission Apparition_ , or some semi-competent youtube knockoffs whose craftsmanship is barely above that of your average Victorian spiritualist.”

“You’re not listening to me. He wasn’t just _into it_ , Lily. He stopped working, he stopped doing anything else. It took over his _life_. What if whoever it was he was talking to, whatever he was involved in -- what if it, they, whoever -- took him?”

“You don’t have very fulfilling jobs,” Lily says. “Didn’t,” she says, after a beat. Sammy doesn’t point out that he’s still working that job; that he’s still limping on, even without Jack there. “He was bound to find some stupid hobby. This isn’t the X-Files, people don’t just get eaten up by spirits they were chatting with online. _Maybe he met someone he likes better than you and didn’t know how to tell you_.”

“It’s impossible to talk to you when you’re like this,” Sammy says, and he walks out.

\---

It’s his house, it’s still his, _their_ house, but it’s not his when _they’re_ in it. Jack’s parents don’t like Sammy, and never have, and they don’t even know the half of it. They stop talking when he enters the room, like he’s a stranger, like he’s nothing, like he didn’t--

They pay a private detective to look into it as the cops clearly don’t care, even they can see that. The PI’s got bloodshot eyes, a quiet manner, and dirty hands that smudge everything he touches. Sammy has kept Jack’s journal. He can have everything else, but not the journal. He’s looked through it himself; he knows everything in it is meaningless. There are no addresses, no clues. Not really. Nothing that will mean anything to anyone else.

And if anyone else sees it, they’ll think that Jack was crazy. Hell, maybe they’ll just think that he was using drugs, that he got caught up in some kind of deal gone wrong, that he was in debt to someone -- and then they’ll stop looking. It won’t be worth it to them anymore.

It’s worth it to Sammy. Whatever the truth is. At night, when he can’t sleep -- it’s happening more and more these days -- he pages through the notebook, He looks at the meaningless scribbles, the painstakingly terrible stick-figure drawings of creatures he can’t name, the strange equations, the occasional photograph of a fucking clearing in a wood, or a radio tower or a wreath of white roses. He feels like there’s a code that he can’t crack, he’s never going to be able to crack it. And if he can’t, the person who knows Jack best -- and if Lily won’t even talk to him when he tries to bring it up -- what hope does anyone else have?

\---

Sometimes, he dreams of the phone ringing. Except it’s not his cell -- it’s Jack’s. He fumbles to answer, and there’s nothing but static at the other end of the line. Or it’s Jack, asking if he wants anything from the grocery shop. Or it’s Lily, but she won’t say anything, she’s just. Breathing heavily down the line.

More often, it’s just a lot of noise. _Scratching_. It’s like the notebook: there’s some kind of code, some kind of logic that is utterly, totally alien to Sammy. He wasn’t capable of following it, of understanding any of this, when Jack was here and desperate to tell him about it.

What hope does he have now that Jack’s gone?

\---

Sammy never misses work. For a while their second producer, a total asshole called Craig, gets bumped up to fill for Jack. When it’s clear that Jack’s not coming back, they start to look for a new co-host and producer, because Craig sucks and even the execs can see it.

Sammy sits in on half a dozen interviews and asks questions and shakes hands and every Saturday night he sits down and says awful things. He’s never been proud of the show, not really, but it’s so much worse without Jack. “I don’t care about your problems,” he says to a caller who sounds like she’s been crying, who says all she wants in the world is to see her idol onstage. “We’ve all got problems, come on, you’re killing me. _Tell me your cup size and I’ll think about giving you some Rihanna tickets_.”

\---

 _Lily was right_ , he thinks. He thinks it as he says it. He thinks it on a vicious loop in his head. It’s catchier than any advertising jingle he’s ever fucking heard, and he’s done his time in local radio -- he knows about jingles. Sammy considers quitting right there and then, it’s been three months, he still hasn’t quit, he’s still working his soulless, awful job, _alone_ , but it takes another month. Another month of waking up every day, getting dressed, choking down a black coffee and some oats and thinking: _Lily was right. Lily was right._

He starts to see Jack everywhere. At the corner grocery, in the mirror in the morning. He sees Jack when he’s trying to fall asleep, begging him to just try to understand, to come with him, to follow him wherever he wants to go. He sees Jack when he wakes up, and has to blink to see that he’s not there, that Sammy is just wishing for too much again.

Wherever Jack is -- Sammy can’t follow. Could never hope to.

 _Lily was right. Lily was right._ The terrible pun refuses to make itself. Sammy doesn’t want to laugh about this. In the end, he sends the email to his station manager in the middle of the afternoon before a Saturday show. It’s not a long message.

Hi Yusuf,

Please take this message as notice that I’ll be leaving my job here in two weeks.

S

They’ve hired his replacement -- some guy they already interviewed for _Jack’s_ job -- before the two weeks are even up.

\---

Jack’s parents stop by before Sammy moves out. They pack up Jack’s room -- _the spare room_ \-- and take his things away with them. They let Sammy keep the stuff they owned together -- the stupid big TV he never watches, all the kitchenware, the home radio equipment that Sammy had helped Jack to buy back when they were still in college. But they take away most of his clothes, his books...

They take Jack’s car. The cops finally gave the keys back, and his mom drives it right out of there. Sammy knows he’ll never see it again. He’s still got the spare key, attached to his own. He keeps it there. If Jack’s mom forgot to ask for it...

Sammy doesn’t really have a claim on any of it. Not without using his words and making that claim and fighting. So he makes do with the little things.

He doesn’t have it in him. Not for this fight. Not now.

\---

It’s the middle of the night a week or so before he finally has the courage to quit Shotgun Saturday Nights when Sammy finds the King Falls AM website. It’s shitty, outdated, and it takes forever to load. But there on the homepage is a photo that he recognises: it’s the radio tower from Jack’s notebook.

He emails the owner of the station there and then and begs for a job. He says he’d be happy to take anything -- even a middle of the night slot that would otherwise be empty, filled with repeats, or with some fucking ambient music mix. He types out his _most impressive credentials_ and attaches a resume, and he forgets about the email as soon as he sends it, until Merv -- the owner -- calls him back two days later to offer him the job sight unseen. Middle of the night talk radio in the middle of ass-nowhere, Oregon. For terrible pay and probably no listeners.

It’s a terrible idea. When he tunes in to the station online it’s either some old guy sexually harassing his listeners punctuated by the odd jazz song, or it’s about local sports. Not even football or something he can pretend to understand -- they’re just talking about fucking _fishing_. What does he think he’s doing?

But he accepts the offer, and a few days later he quits his dream job, the job he hates so much that he’s started to throw up before going in to work. And he’s terminating his lease -- _their_ lease, because it still has Jack’s name on it. He can remember the day they signed it; how different he was only three years ago.

Two weeks after that, he’s packing up all of the things he wants to keep and can fit in his car. He pays to put the rest in storage, because he can’t bring him to throw it all out -- their bed, their bookcases, the sofa Jack had chosen because it was big enough that they could lie down on it _together_.

He gives away the spare bed on freecycle, because Jack’s parents didn’t take it away, and he can’t see that he’s ever going to want or need _that_ again.

\---

It’s the end of April, and it’s hot in LA, it’s always hot, and his entire life is -- well, the half-life he’s currently living -- packed into his car. It doesn’t look like much. He feels oddly weightless. And he starts to drive north.

\---

He’s got the radio on. He doesn’t bother much when he passes out of a coverage area, or about re-tuning for different stations. So he catches weird snippets of angry talk radio, country music, and whatever else people care about in northern California and southern Oregon. Sometimes it takes him minutes to realise he’s just been listening to angry static.

It’s a thirteen-hour drive. He sets off early and stops for lunch at a roadside diner. It’s western themed, with cowboy hats and more country music, and he hates it. But he eats some tasteless fries and has half a strawberry milkshake and he sits in his car in the parking lot for half an hour before he can make himself set off on the road again.

\---

It’s dark when he’s approaching the town, which seems to be surrounded on one side by a forest, the other by a massive wooded area, with a small mountain and a lake thrown in for good measure.

The easy way in is supposedly through part of the the forest. Right. He curses his GPS, which is probably fucking with him on purpose -- and keeps driving.

As soon as he’s in the forest the GPS goes dark. He flails one hand at it and keeps the other one on the steering wheel. Fuck. He looks out for road signs, and there’s like --

Absolutely fucking _nothing_.

He can’t get a signal on his phone, so that’s out too. He’s just... driving into the unknown, and it doesn’t have the courtesy to let him through, to _greet him_.

He’s been lost for almost twenty minutes when he gets pulled over by a local cop. He has no idea how fast he was going; he’s just glad that there’s someone else out there.

“Looking a little lost there, bud.” The cop says, when Sammy winds down his window.

“Yeah,” Sammy says, squinting up at him. “Want to see my license, officer?” He pulls it out before waiting for an answer and holds it up.

“No need for any of that,” the cop says. “I was thinking you looked like you could use some help finding your way somewhere.”

“Uh, yeah,” Sammy says, and takes a deep breath. He can do this. He can charm this stranger and probably avoid being arrested for speeding or trespassing or... anything else that they don’t like people doing in small, rural towns. Charming people is hie entire skillset. He might have alienated everybody he’s ever known, but he’s great at talking to strangers! “I’m actually looking for the radio station in a small town called King Falls...”

\---

Sammy is almost late to his first show. “Some things never change,” he mutters to himself, as he knocks at the door to the station -- little more than a wooden shack -- and prays that a producer or _somebody_ is there and able to let him in and set him up.

The door is opened basically before he’s finished knocking, and a short guy with a shock of curly dark hair is staring at him. “Um, hi,” Sammy tries. “I’m Sammy Stevens, I’m meant to be presenting the new show starting tonight?”

“Oh, thank god,” the guy says, and grabs his arm and pulls him inside. “I thought you weren’t going to show up, and that I was going to have to bribe Chet to stay to cover for you, and I really -- trust me, you don’t know Chet but I’m really -- um, I want to be an _actual journalist_ and I don’t want to work for _Chet’s creepy-ass show_ anymore.”

Sammy massages his forehead with the heel of his hand. Well, at least it’s not spooky.

“Is there time for me to grab a coffee before the show starts? And maybe you can tell me your name and what you do around here.”

“The kitchen is just through -- Oh, right, _right_ ,” he says, and sticks out his hand for Sammy to shake. “I’m Ben Arnold, not Benjamin, just Ben, I’m your producer. Did Merv mention me?”

Sammy tactfully avoids telling him that Merv had in no way mentioned anything about a producer, and that Sammy had never really thought to ask. “You know, Ben, it was a pretty whirlwind hiring process, I’m hoping you can help get me set up and on the right track.”

Ben grins. “That is absolutely what I’m here for. Well, and for making sure you don’t swear. And for scheduling -- I was thinking, for guests this week, there’s a travelling --”

“I’m sorry, can we go back to that coffee idea?” Sammy says.

“Right!” Ben says, and finally shows Sammy to a closet with a sink and a coffee machine that Sammy thinks could only actually be called a kitchen if you were feeling _very_ generous. He’ll see how he feels later in the week. It’s been a long day.

Sammy takes a sip of coffee -- it’s fine, passable, he’ll survive -- and grins. They’re on in ten minutes, and he doesn’t have to ask any women to take their clothes off ever again, hopefully, and somehow there’s still room in his cold, dead soul for that sweet tingle of pre-show anticipation. “So a journalist, huh?” He says. “That the dream?”

“Oh?” Ben says, seeming slightly embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess I did say that. You know, that’s the -- the big goal.”

“What type of journalist you hoping to be?” He says. He’s pretty sure that Chet’s the creepy jazz guy he’s heard a few times. “Music? You hoping to be the new Lester Bangs? Or wait, that’s the show you don’t _want_ to work on anymore.”

“I was thinking more, you know, investigative.” Ben says it slightly bashfully, but gets more into it as he talks. “Some pretty weird stuff has been known to happen in town.”

“ _Really_ ,” Sammy says.

“Yeah! And it’s not like the Gazette can keep on top of it, and Channel 13 is up the mayor’s--”

“Right,” Sammy says. He has no idea what the fuck Channel 13 is, but he’s sure he’ll find out soon enough. He finishes the last mouthful of coffee. “Sounds like the town could use someone like you, Ben.”

And if even a fraction of the weird stuff he’s ever heard about King Falls is true, then he means it.

\---

It’s only when they’re getting the mics set up that Sammy realises that Ben isn’t supposed to be an _on-air_ producer. “I’m more, you know, background,” Ben says. “I’m not great on the mic, I tend to, kind of, ramble on -- you’re the big shot host, man, you’ve got this.”

 _I absolutely do not,_ Sammy thinks. He makes a non-committal noise. He takes a deep breath.

Within thirty seconds, he’s got Ben talking. Within five minutes, he’s got a co-host.

Sammy’s good at charming strangers. He may be in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, with barely more than the clothes on his back. But he’s still got that.

\---

It takes Sammy a while to realise that when Ben talks, part of him relaxes. He _laughs_ . He’s not just _surviving_ their conversations; he’s not just fooling Ben into liking him. It’s like -- he likes Ben. He likes Troy, and other people in town, too.

A small part of him that he didn’t know was closed off starts, very slowly, to unfurl. It doesn’t make up for everything that he’s lost. But --

After they finish their first show, a high-on-adrenaline Ben takes Sammy out to a diner for pancakes and more coffee, and he helps Sammy find a motel afterwards, and the next day they get a post-show breakfast again, and the day after that, and soon enough it’s been three weeks and Sammy has a shitty apartment and no more clue about where to find Jack than before he left California, but he has a _friend_ , and a new job he somehow, sometimes _likes_ , and it’s still hard to make himself get out of bed, it’s still hard to face himself in the mirror, but sometimes he can forget about it for the amount of time it takes to tell a dumb joke, or ask a question that’s perfectly designed to set Ben off on a ludicrous rant.

\---

“You’re a hard nut to crack, Sammy Stevens,” Jack said, once, long ago, when they were still... _friends_. The memory’s fuzzy around the edges, but Sammy thinks... they were working together on an assignment in Sammy’s senior-year dorm, and Jack had been asking a series of increasingly personal questions that Sammy didn’t know how to answer.

“There’s just not much to tell,” Sammy said, and flopped back against his pillows and shielded his face from Jack with his elbow. “I’m not a very interesting guy.”

“Sammy,” Jack said, reaching over and tugging on a lock of his hair. “You’re my best friend. I love you. You are _not_ boring.”

Sammy had no idea how to answer that. Any of it. Especially... “And sometimes you’re so closed off I wonder if the Men in Black secretly grew you in a lab underground somewhere.”

Sammy threw a pillow at him. “ _Jack_. I just don’t like talking about that stuff.”

“Yeah, sure, Sammy,” Jack said, and he looked at him seriously, with big beautiful dark eyes and Sammy was so gone, had been so gone since day one. “But if you ever do want to talk about it, any of it, you know I want to listen to whatever you’ve got to say, right?”

“I do,” Sammy said, a big lump in his throat.

Jack nodded, satisfied. “It’s you and me against the world, Sammy. Which means that if you won’t answer any of my personal questions, you’ve got to help me make a kick-ass plan for how to deal with an alien invasion...”

\---

Lily comes to see Sammy at Ben’s after the mess of May 1st. He’s fine, he’s totally fine, he’d just been kind of semi-hypothermic and in mild shock and maybe suicidal for a minute there, and Ben will barely let him out of his sight, and he’s wrapped up in a blanket on the couch, and it takes Lily five minutes to convince Ben to even let her alone with Sammy at all.

“Hey,” she says, collapsing next to him on the couch.

“Hey,” he echoes.

They’re both so lousy at this. Not for the first time, the part of Sammy’s brain that can still think about these things wonders how Jack came to be. How someone like him ever existed, came to exist, and survived for as long as he did, when he was surrounded by such repressed idiots.

“It’s not your fault,” she says. Which is a thing Sammy keeps hearing.

“We both know you’d rather it was me in there,” he says. He didn’t know he was going to say it, and then he says it, and it’s out there. There’s a long silence. “Me too. But I guess it didn’t want me!”

“Don’t say that shit to me,” Lily says, which isn’t really a denial. But. “It may have escaped your notice, _asshole_ , but plenty of people want you here and are glad you’re not dead or stuck in some stupid void somewhere, and that _includes_ me, and your new best friend, who I’m sure is just on the other side of that door and waiting for us to let him back in, and can probably hear everything we’re saying right now.”

Sammy sighs, and Ben cracks the door open. “I just worry about Sammy!” He says. “Is that a crime? I think my concerns are more than justified!!!”

“Ben,” Sammy says, heavily.

“Oh my god,” Lily says, and she stands up. “I’m going to order us some pizza, we’re going to play SingStar on this ancient PS3, and then we are never discussing the events of this evening ever again on pain of death. Do you hear me?”

Somehow, it helps.

\---

Somehow, it all keeps happening. Sammy is sleeping so, so badly. Worse than ever. It’s a hot summer, and he’s out of a job, And he keeps waking up, and making himself get out of bed. And some days he even leaves the apartment.

And it all keeps happening. He’s glad for it, he thinks.

\---

A long, hot, feverish summer, with nothing to do but heal, and he’s healing so, so slowly. Until Lily and Ben start cooking something up. Secretly, Sammy can’t even be too mad. It just keeps happening. It always has. Even when he thought it had stopped. It never did.

\---

Dreams: A hand in his hand. Secrets he forgot he knew, and forgot he’d ever shared. A different version of himself. Hair shorn off, left all over the floor. Jagged glass; cut his thumb almost clean off. Stitches, bandages, neon diner sign, chicken strips, iced tea, brown sugar that coats his teeth when he drinks, a dive into the lake, which is cold and murky and freshwater and full of dead things, and things that shouldn’t be alive, and doors that don’t open right, and doors that don’t lead anywhere, and doors, and doors, and doors, and his own bed, and the ancient aircon unit spluttering at his window like an old woman with a cough, and burnt bacon and old bread toasted so you can’t taste the staleness, and Jack telling him things he never knew before, new secrets, just the other side of the wall -- he knows this -- just the other side of something, the sky, if the wheels spin backwards, there’s never enough time, there never was and maybe never will be, but that determined look on Ben’s face, the tightly-laced sneakers on Sammy’s feet, a slight scrape on his knuckles, the wheels spinning in mud, now over tarmac and dust and grass, spinning backwards, backwards, backwards -- then going straight ahead, faster than he’s ever seen before, and there’s never enough time for any of it, but there are some things you can get back. Some things that come back to you. Cats. Lost pennies. Self-addressed envelopes. Love. Questions. Gifts. Other things, too.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr at alwaysalreadyangry.  
> sorry if this is too similar to my other kfam fic. this is my beat i guess.


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